I suddenly thought I could make it all stop

impossible to revise for A-Levels, muses on ending his life by taking an overdose of painkillers.

“I suddenly thought I could make it all stop and I cried for about an hour and wrote the note.”

The following day, the note lies “in a million pieces” in the bin and the entry concludes: “Get a grip, boy. Get a f***ing grip.”

He says it was the thought of what his death would do “to everyone else” that stopped him.

He hopes the book will help others in a similar position “notice that they’re not alone”. He says it would have been “really peculiar” not to have included his diary entry “if I’m talking about repression of feelings and how it is drilled into boys during childhood and the terrible effects it has if we drag that through adolescence and into this kind of half-formed manhood where we don’t know how to take responsibility for our feelings...”

Robert’s complex relationship with his dad, who split from his mum when he was just five, figures heavily in the book; from the fear of him he had as a child, to living with him again after his mum died. His dad died in 2013 and Robert says he couldn’t have written the book while he was alive.

“I couldn’t afford to be that honest about his mistakes when we were little, I couldn’t write that politely. I had to be quite hard on him there – I hope I’m generous to him later. I’m not out to settle scores but I try to show some of his redeeming qualities. He was a lot of fun to be around and a good chap in many ways.”

In the book, he describes his dad having “a temper” after being in the pub. At the time there was really nothing out of the ordinary about that level of physical admonishment.

“It was the fact that it was arbitrary, where you don’t know how to do the right thing and you don’t know what you did wrong. That was what made him scary to me.”

The memoir starts with what Robert calls the overture, which cleverly segues from him rewriting the lyrics to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up for a school dance sketch, to performing his 2009 comedy version of Flashdance, which won him Let’s Dance For Comic Relief.

He reveals how, back home that night, his wife Abigail pregnant with their first daughter, he sat “in our little garden” and drank “another two bottles of red wine” and smoked “about thirty Marlboro Lights”.

Of his drinking, he says: “I was never horribly aggressive but you do become slightly more short-tempered and a bit more chippy and just a boring d**k to live with. So, I just have to keep an eye on that and I drink a lot less now.”

Although he never went to Alcoholics Anonymous, he admits “it was suggested”.

“I just basically said, ‘Watch me, I’ll do this on my own’ and I kind of did and it wasn’t that much of a struggle. I just did seven weeks of filming [new sitcom] Back and obviously alcoholics can’t do that,” he says, with a laugh.

“Going from 8am to 8pm without a drink was not even the remotest challenge, that’s what I reckon. To people with an investment in AA, that may sound like self-delusion, but as far as I’m concerned it’s under control...”

Robert married Abbie, a fellow comic, in 2007 and they have two daughters. He says their marriage was never seriously on the rocks.

“There were times we would have an argument and she would start looking for her passport and say, ‘That’s it, I’m going to Mexico’. But it was just never going to happen, it was that kind of row and we don’t really have those rows any more.”

Admitting gender stereotyping is “a preoccupation of mine”, he’s conscious of wanting to model what being a good husband and dad should be to his daughters.

“I know they have got their eye on me and the way I model being a man in a domestic setting is critical really.

“I get this stuff wrong all the time. I still get angry when what I’m actually feeling is embarrassment and I still don’t do 50 per cent of the house and the kids, but I am doing a lot better than I did before and trying to take responsibility for my health.”